It all started, like so many things have, on a dusty stage in a dimly lit French Quarter bar.

It was summer 2002 and it was hot, hot, hot, and a taller-than-he-looks-in-the-movies Vince Vaughn was making a good idea a reality, hosting his own live comedy show (a comedy show, of all things) at the now dearly departed Matador nightclub.

A pre-superstar Dane Cook was one of the three guys he introduced that night. So was funnyman Bobby Lee, the resident Korean cross-dresser on the sketch comedy show "Mad TV, " and the Egyptian funnyman Ahmed Ahmed.

It was a good night, a fun night, and people throughout the uberhip Matador -- those assembled in front of the tiny stage, those huddled around the circular bar -- were letting themselves laugh.

And then, right there at the corner of Decatur Street and Esplanade Avenue, in the bar owned by local impresario and frequent Vaughn wingman Rio Hackford, Vaughn thought, I could get used to this.

So whenever he got a chance, he would arrange another, similar little show, cramming it into his schedule wherever it would fit, sometimes for charity, always for fun.

"I did the show just as a way to give him (Rio) a good night, and people kind of responded well, so I started doing one-offs, " Vaughn said. "The show was always so well received."

That idea: Toss a few suitcases and a few comedians into a tour bus and string together 30 shows in 30 nights in 30 cities. All the while, cameras would roll, picking up the onstage antics and the backstage insanity.

Adding to all the standup comedy would be various bits of nouveau vaudeville goofery staged by celebrity guests and Friends-of-Vince including, at various times, country music star Dwight Yoakam, actor-director Jon Favreau ("Swingers, " "The Break Up"), Justin Long ("Dodgeball, " "The Break-Up") and Keir O'Donnell ("Wedding Crashers" and -- three guesses -- "The Break-Up").

Vince Vaughn

A VALENTINE
FROM VAUGHN

If Vince Vaughn ever gets bored with the whole movie-star thing -- or the comedy-show ringmaster thing -- he should think about a gig with the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau.

During an interview while he was in town last October for the 2007 New Orleans Film Festival for a screening of "Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show," the frequent visitor to the city positively gushed about New Orleans and its filmmaking tax incentives -- so much so that he's probably worthy of honorary Yat-hood.

Here's a sampling:

"People keep saying to me, the film community has been great to New Orleans, but I think that's very much a two-way street. New Orleans has been great to the film community. A lot of people got to make films that otherwise they wouldn't have been able to make; there's a great rebate here.

"New Orleans is such a great city -- the architecture -- you can't compete with anything. Sean (Penn) made a movie down here a while ago ('All the King's Men') that was a remake of a film, and it's really provided a lot of opportunity to Hollywood and filmmakers for being a place that's given people a chance to do things. So I think it's really been a two-way street that way.

"And I've always loved New Orleans. I love the people here. I love the food here. I love the architecture here. There's only one New Orleans, and it's a great place."

Back at ya, dawlin'.

-- Mike Scott

"I thought, with me growing up in Illinois, it seems like the coasts have sucked everything up, " Vaughn said in October when he came to town for the New Orleans Film Festival, a print of his film under his arm. "You've either got to go to New York or L.A. or Vegas to see a live show, so I wanted to stage a good, top comedy show and bring it to people's backyards."

Thirty shows in 30 days and 30 nights. So cute. So sweet. So freakin' naive.

. . . . . . .

Turns out, the road -- which sounds like such a cool, liberating place to folks who don't have to rely on it for their beer money -- has a way of quickly turning into a grind. And a 30-day road trip with no days off -- well, that's nothing short of grueling.

"I was warned. Dwight Yoakam is a friend of mine, and he said, 'Vince, no one does 30 days in a row, ' " Vaughn recalled. "I said, 'But Dwight, then I won't be able to play all the cities. I don't have that kind of schedule.'

"Then I realized when I was out there, you do start to feel like you're being Federal Expressed from city to city."

Actor Peter Billingsley -- he of "A Christmas Story" and a longtime member of Vaughn's posse, dating back to their shared billing on an "After School Special" about steroid use in the 1980s -- signed on as an executive producer. He would appear onstage and ride shotgun on the 2005 trip, as a logistical point man. He, like Vaughn, was also blissfully clueless.

"We had never really produced a live event. We never even carried a sound person or a lighting person with us, " Billingsley said. "We'd literally go to each venue and they'd say, 'OK, here's Bob; he's lighting. Here's Jim; he's sound.'

"We ran into a couple of groups on the road, a couple of bands, and they were like, 'You guys are nuts, ' " Billingsley said. "Most people said they'd never done more than seven or eight in a row in their lives -- 'You've at least got to take a day off.'

"But we didn't know. We were coming from a naive place: 'Yeah, we'll go do a month of shows.' "

"About 15 days in, we were ready to kill each other."

. . . . . . .

Here's the thing about "Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show": Despite what the title suggests, it's about more than guys walking into bars, or priests and rabbis on a boat, or gifted gents who happen to hail from Nantucket.

There are jokes, sure, but just as important to the film is what goes on when the spotlights are doused and the whole production humps gear frantically to the next town -- when the stage personas are dropped and the show's funnymen reveal their human sides.

About halfway through the film, the guy whose name is on the marquee, Vaughn, quietly takes a back seat to his hand-picked group of comics -- sharp-witted Everyman John Caparulo; lovable lug Brett Ernst; dandy Sebastian Maniscalco; and good ol' double-Ahmed, from that original show at the Matador -- as they emerge as the real stars of the show.

In the 700 hours of footage collected during the tour, the comedians share the kinds of heavy personal things that always seem to make a good comic a good comic, such as Ernst's loss of his brother to HIV, and Ahmed's struggle with being of Egyptian heritage in a very, very nervous America.

What's more, it becomes apparent that -- in addition to being goofballs of the first order -- they're all just plain nice guys.

"The whole reason I picked them was because I'm not big on guys that are just gimmick comedians, " Vaughn said, "and I don't like comedy that's at someone's expense or leaves you feeling kind of bad. Like that feeling when you're a kid and someone gets picked on, and everyone laughs and that kid's crying? I don't like that feeling. I like it more when it's inclusive.

"I'm drawn to these guys more because they're good and genuine and honest. At a time when everyone's trying to act cool or like nothing's bothering them, I really like that they're very vulnerable and very out there.

"It became evident in the editing room that this was the most compelling thing about the film. These guys and their individual journey is really what the audience becomes most invested in."

. . . . . . .

A not-so-funny thing happened on the cirque du Vince's way to the forum in New Orleans.

One Eyed Jacks on Toulouse Street is smaller than some of the tour's other venues, sure, but it's owned by Vaughn's buddy Hackford, the same guy who owned the now-shuttered Matador. It's also nestled amid the hanging gardens and hooting frat boys of the French Quarter, just as the Matador had been, and from the get-go Vaughn's heart had been pulled toward the birthplace of the whole shootin' match, his own little Cavern Club.

"We were going to play in New Orleans, obviously, since this was the first show we ever did, " Vaughn said. "And then Katrina happened."

They had been in Texas at the time, a few days from making that turn toward the Crescent City.

"We didn't realize how severe it was. With Rio, I was like, 'Well, I'm going to come anyway.' He said, 'Well, you can't.' I said, 'The f- - - I can't.'

Turns out, Rio was right. The New Orleans show and two others were washed away, along with so much else.

While the show's organizers scrambled to set a new course -- hey, the show must go on -- cameras rolled, and they ended up catching some of the film's more moving moments.

"It kind of just all happened at once, " said Billingsley, who found himself at the center of a logistical worst-case-scenario. "It was a crazy time."

A frequent visitor to, and devoted fan of, New Orleans, Billingsley can be seen onscreen not just trying to figure out where the show would go next, but also cajoling the show's comics -- some of whom, like many people, hadn't quite yet wrapped their heads around the absolute hell that Katrina had wreaked -- to visit storm victims at a makeshift refugee camp at an Alabama campground.

"You just never know at the time what the effects of something will be, but there were clearly people who were being displaced, " Billingsley said. "All we wanted to do was say, 'Just come out and laugh. Just come out and please have a night on us.' "

The visit with the storm victims ended up having a major impact on the comedians (and on the film), however. Still, although local audiences are sure to find the Katrina segment absorbing, it's hard not to think how it'll play in Peoria.

If New Orleans movie-goers look hard, they'll see Vaughn wearing a Pal's Lounge T-shirt in his "Wild West Comedy Show, " his tip of the cap to the hipster hangout on Rendon Street, two blocks from Bayou St. John, and another of his local haunts.

He'll cringe if you bring it up.

"Sadly, I think I wear it two days in a row, " he said, laughing, "and they really were consecutive days -- I didn't change my shirt."

"We would get hotel rooms for the day for people to be able to shower, " Billingsley said, "but there was no sleeping. We slept every night on the road -- nobody ever slept in a hotel room -- because you literally had to keep moving.

"Once you wrapped the show, some places you'd have maybe a few hours to go out, get a beer, see the town a little bit, meet some people, and then you're gone."

As rigorous as it was, though, a definite camaraderie developed among the men, and Vaughn won't rule out doing it again in some form. His memories of the experience are so fond, in fact, that he bought one of the tour's buses, he recently told Entertainment Weekly magazine, and uses it as his trailer on the set of his latest film, "Four Christmases, " which he's doing with Reese Witherspoon. It's due out in November.

(It's also probably worth noting here that the first entry under "special thanks" in the film's credits goes to Anheuser-Busch. Sony PlayStation also pops up a few lines down. Safe to assume this wasn't one of those all-work, no-play type of gigs.)

"It was a moment in time, " Vaughn said. "It was 30 days, but there's something about getting up live each night and making people laugh and connecting with people. . . . I really love acting and making films, but there's a great feeling about going out each night and kind of throwing a party where everybody gets to laugh and have a good time and get in a good mood.

"I would do it again, definitely, " he said, adding a crucial caveat, "But I don't know about 30 shows in 30 days.

"And when I do the show again, it definitely will come to New Orleans -- it's where we started the show."